Ladon Design History

Recently, I have been trying to get back into the swing of designing things. In order to do that, I did some sketches of my kaiju Ladon. This was done to get a feel of how preferences have affected design choices. Here are some thoughts on each.

The top most and first design was primarily saurian. It took inspiration from various reptilian monsters. Examples of this are: Sharptooth from Land Before Time, Gorosaurus, JP's Spinosaurus, and possibly 's Vastrato. Said saurian design helped to kickstart a kaijuverse. Named "The Armaggedon Series" had a plot where monsters were coming to our world from another dimension. A nifty idea and it lasted a fair bit of time. Meaning this design was probably the one that was around for the longest time frame. From it's posting date in December of 2011 to August of 2013. During that time Ladon's core design didn't change much. If there were any changes, they were due to an increase of artistic skill.

Next we have a more serpentine design. Admittedly the cause for the design change were silly thoughts of "My main monster needs to be more unique!" Because to pre college me unique=good.  So taking inspiration from, bizarrly enough, a Naruto Fanfiction; I made a design that took traits from sea snakes. Traits such as Ladon's body pattern and a venomous bite. This design lasted for little over a year. Going from August 2013 to November 2014. Eventually this fell out of favor because I got sort of bored with the design. College kept me from really being able to write a kaiju story. Which killed the mojo the design had.

Finally we have the bottom design. The original image can be found here: sta.sh/0leg6evtmxh Now I never really made this design public. As I wanted things to remain a secret until the kaijuverse's story could be posted.  The design came to me during a college lecture. I was sort of doodling and drew a fish monster. It mixed traits from the fish monster here: shadyserpent269.deviantart.com… with Ladon. This lead to the idea of changing Ladon from a dinosaur from another dimension, to a mutated black dragonfish. In turn, this caused Ladon's powers to change from having plasma breath, to having acid breath, then finally having frost breath.

This version of the series got fairly far into development. A roster of monsters was developed and the plot for the story was figured out. However, I never truly worked on it due to a mixture of school and....I kinda didn't like this Ladon. Yeah he was unique, but I couldn't really connect with him. He didn't really have the traits that originally inspired me.  So both Ladon and the series went back into design limbo. That is until it was decided both were to be scrapped.

As mentioned in the first line of this ramble, I've been in a rut. None of the kaiju designs I've done conceptually to replace Ladon have stuck. The desire to work on anything kaiju related has sort of stagnated. In order to try and get things back on track, I'm going to try to go back and reconnect with the original inspirations. Let's see where this goes shall we?